Network capacity planning may measure a network's ability to serve users at remote locations at an acceptable speed and with acceptable transaction success rates. The process may involve measuring the computing resources that may be necessary to support users at a remote location in their use of a particular application. Among the constraints on the performance of a network are bandwidth, latency, bandwidth utilization, packet loss rate, jitter rate and others.
Factors that may be considered for evaluating a performance of an application at a remote network location may include a transaction response time (TRT) that a user at a remote location may encounter when for example requesting a transfer of data from a remote server or the updating of data to a remote data base. A maximum permissible range for a TRT may be known as a service level objective (SLO).
Prior network capacity systems, either analytical and/or discreet event simulation tools may model network communication constraints on links with remote locations, and may execute transactions of an application on such models. Modeling network constraints, characteristics or conditions to remote network locations is subject to inaccuracies and inconsistencies and is heavily dependent on the integrity of the model being used.